Spatial frequency processing and its modulation by emotional content in severe alcohol use disorder

Abstract

Rationale Visuo-perceptive deficits in severe alcohol use disorder (SAUD) remain little understood, notably regarding the respective involvement of the two main human visual streams, i.e., magnocellular (MC) and parvocellular (PC) pathways, in these deficits. Besides, in healthy populations, low-level visual perception can adapt depending on the nature of visual cues, among which emotional features, but this MC and PC pathway adaptation to emotional content is unexplored in SAUD. Objectives To assess MC and PC functioning as well as their emotional modulations in SAUD. Methods We used sensitivity indices (d′) and repeated-measures analyses of variance to compare orientation judgments of Gabor patches sampled at various MC-and PC-related spatial frequencies in 35 individuals with SAUD and 38 matched healthy controls. We then explored how emotional content modulated performances by introducing neutral or fearful face cues immediately before the Gabor patches and added the type of cue in the analyses. Results SAUD patients showed a general reduction in sensitivity across all spatial frequencies, indicating impoverished processing of both coarse and fine-scale visual content. However, we observed selective impairments depending on facial cues: individuals with SAUD processed intermediate spatial frequencies less efficiently than healthy controls following neutral faces, whereas group differences emerged for the highest spatial frequencies following fearful faces. Altogether, SAUD was associated with mixed MC and PC deficits that may vary according to emotional content, in line with a flexible but suboptimal use of low-level visual content. Such subtle alterations could have implications for everyday life's complex visual judgments.

Altered attentional processing of facial expression features in severe alcohol use disorder: An eye-tracking study.

“…However, cognitively oriented explanations have tended to focus on the latter set of processes (Uekermann & Daum, 2008), and corroborating studies have evidenced links between higher-order cognitive abilities such as episodic memory and executive functioning, and EFE recognition in SAUD (Quaglino et al, 2015). By comparison, the consideration of mechanisms that could interfere with the extraction of relevant socioaffective cues has been surprisingly limited in this group, with the notable exception of recent preliminary work suggesting that EFE recognition impairments in SAUD may also arise from difficulties in the low-level visual decoding of certain spatial frequencies (Creupelandt et al, 2019, 2022). Here, we address this issue and extend the investigation of cognitive mechanisms underlying EFE recognition impairments in SAUD toward the up-to-now neglected attentional domain.…”